Hofstadter, Chapter 6

In Chapter 6, Hofstadter discusses the fall of the intellectual aristocrats from the Founding generation.  His take is that America ceased to revere aristocrats because the aristocrats soon became divided between political parties, and so they cast aspersions on each other while courting the masses.

On page 155 he quotes Thomas Jefferson (among the most learned and thoughtful of the Founders, even if deeply flawed in his own ways) praising the commoners over the elite:

State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well, and often better than the later, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.

Hofstadter goes on to argue that Jefferson was only asserting the moral superiority of the common people, not the technical and intellectual superiority. However, in public affairs there is an inevitable intertwining of moral and factual questions.  "Should the government fund this program?" is, of course, an "ought" question, but virtually any individual will include a cost-benefit analysis in their moral calculus. Yes, some (e.g. libertarians) will oppose all programs of a given nature, and some (e.g. the more naive leftists) will have unreserved enthusiasm for all programs of a given sort, but most will either overcome skepticism for a sufficiently beneficial program, or overcome enthusiasm for a sufficiently costly program. So "ought" and "is" are intertwined.  If you hold up ordinary people as being not just sufficient judges of these matters (the basic premise of democracy), but actually superior judges (the anti-intellectual premise of populism) then you are, at a minimum, discounting the value of the expert voice in favor of the "ought" side of the question.

Also, as intellectual as Jefferson was, he had the common intellectual drawback of eccentricity, coupled with a decidedly rural sensibility. This made him skeptical of the urban culture that is most conducive to intellectual work.  I say that not to disparage the mental demands of farm work and the like (frankly, it's one of the hardest and most essential tasks of civilization), nor to deny the creative benefits of retreating from the city (many a great work has been composed in a rural retreat), but simply to note its highly specialized nature, and the fact that specialization is the defining trait of urban economic activity. Jefferson's skepticism of cities meant that while, as an individual, he could be a contributor to intellectual culture, as a leader he could never be its champion. (That's fine; most writers, scientists, artists, etc. will never be good at making their case to the wider public. But we shouldn't be surprised when they lead political parties that don't make the case for learning.)

Anyway, at first I was skeptical of Hofstadter's point about the division of the educated aristocrats in the Founding generation.  Wouldn't that just give both parties a set of intellectual heroes? But thinking about it more, I realized two things:
1) Many countries have, at least in their past if not in their present, an aristocratic party and a labor party (and perhaps also a separate agrarian party). We have arguably had labor and agrarian interests ascendant in our parties at various times, and we've had plenty of commercial parties, but Blue Blood parties? Even the old Republicans were a party of capitalism more than aristocracy. Academic work has always had an aristocratic element, making it more of a "Guardian" tradition than a "Commercial" tradition (in the terminology of Jane Jacobs).

2) Being a deeply religious country, we raised our Founders to the level of demigods rather than thinkers. We took their words as dogma to absorb, not as ideas to play with.  In an earlier chapter Hofstadter said that intellectuals play with ideas rather than accept them uncritically, but we view the Founders as geniuses beyond questioning.  I remember being struck in high school by the seeming inevitability of the Constitution. It was taught as though every clause (excepting slavery-related ones) added up to a seamless whole embodying a single idea. It seemed like a necessity for freedom.

And then I learned that plenty of wealthy, liberal, and democratic countries had governments with either unicameral legislatures or very weak second chambers, and executives chosen by the legislature. It's 100% the opposite of our seemingly inevitable Constitution of checks and balances...yet it works. Clearly there's more than one way to do this.

A tangential observation: On a different note, on page 154, Hofstadter summarizes an early critic of aristocratic politicians as arguing that if a learned class could do nothing but support privilege then we shouldn't have a learned class.  I think that many of my colleagues would sympathize with that argument, given some of the things that they've said against teaching abstract and complicated concepts, or selecting PhD students based (in part) on their mastery of complicated and abstract concepts. (Yes, for real.)